I’ve been struggling with Twilight revisions, so I’m going to set it aside for now.  I’ve reached the point where I feel as if it just needs to die, and that’s not a positive position to be working from.  So looking at fresh ideas seems a better use of my time, especially since this week is Forward Motion’s Outline Marathon.  Why not?  I needed an idea for NaNoWriMo.  I was talking with Valerie about maybe giving a category romance a try, and she suggested NaNoWriMo might be a good time to do that — the length guidelines are similar.  Brilliant.  So I checked out Harlequin’s various lines and found two I thought I might be able to do something with — American Romance and Intrigue.

I’ve laid out about 24 scenes of a calculated 30, but something didn’t feel right.  I remembered reading a post on Jenny Crusie’s blog shortly after RWA’s convention, and I’d saved it on Bloglines.  I went back there today, and I think I’ve found what I was missing — a suggested story arc.  This was exactly what I was trying to lay out for the category romance story.

The other book I’m laying out was inspired by listening to Glenn Beck last week.  He challenged his readers to write in with “Letters to My Grandchildren.”  The premise is that today’s youth have no idea what The Cold War was all about.  People born after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union are all in their 20s now.  The Cold War and Communist Russia are all boring history lessons to them.   The idea is to share in the form of letters what  life during the Cold War was like.  This way grandchildren will gain insight into this now unusual time in our world history.  I haven’t decided to do this in a non-fictional memoir format or a fictional format.

In other news, I learned why Apple’s mag plug is a good idea a couple of days ago.  I’d just laid my laptop down on my bedside table, closed, top down (to better vent heat from the bottom) while it was running and plugged in.  I stepped away from the table and heard a crash.  Yep, my foot was tangled in the cord, and I pulled it down to the floor when I moved my foot.  I don’t have an Apple laptop…mine is Sony.  It dropped about three feet straight down while running.  I gasped and picked it up.  I opened the cover, and it was putting itself in hibernate mode.  Since it was upside down, the screen was covered with dirt that had been slapped out of the keyboard (one good thing, I guess).  I cleaned the screen and let it finish hibernating.  Then I tried to bring it out of hibernation.  It really didn’t want to come, but I eventually coaxed it to boot successfully.  It also installed the 11 Windows updates that had been waiting.  Since then, it’s been slower than molasses in January to get through a full boot.  I don’t know it if was the shock to the hard drive or the Windows updates.  I think I’ve captured essential files to a memory stick, but I’d still hate to lose this hard drive.  I love this little machine even if it is five years old next month.  I bought it as a top of the line  Sony Vaio TR series when I returned from Bahrain in September 2004.  It’s about the size of a hard cover book, but has 1G of RAM, built-in wifi, and a DVD read-write drive.  Alas, it has an itsy bitsy hard drive (40G), but it’s a great little machine.  The 10″ screen is too small for comfort, but it’s a compromise to get a machine this small and light.  With the optional battery, I get more than five hours of battery life — great for those long sessions I’d have at Panera sometimes.  When the time comes, I will replace this little guy with a MacBookPro, but until then, I’m going to get as much use out of this machine as I can.